In the Great Russian Literary
Tradition of Alienation and Marginalism,
Friedrich Gorenstein's
Death May Give Him the Status He Was Denied in Life

Courtesy: MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV

The name Friedrich
Gorenstein, the Kiev-born author who died March 2 in Berlin at the age of 70,
rings few bells in the English-speaking world outside the small circle of aficionados
of contemporary Russian prose. Small wonder: During his life Gorenstein cultivated
his status as an outsider, positioning himself outside both official Soviet
culture and the dissident anti-communist camp.

This
image, partly self-inflicted, partly impressed upon him by a hostile environment,
had roots in the writer's homeless childhood. His father, an Austrian communist
who immigrated to the Soviet Union to become a professor of political economy
in Kiev, was arrested in 1934 and never heard from again. From the age of 3
Friedrich accompanied his mother, a teacher of children with mental and behavioral
problems, in her peregrinations around the country as she tried to avoid arrest
by Stalin's security police for being the wife of an "enemy of the people."
She apparently froze to death on a freight train in the severe winter of 1941,
running away from the advancing German army. Her son grew up in orphanages,
became a manual worker at the age of 16 and eventually graduated from a college
of mining engineers in 1953. He worked in mines and the construction industry
until 1961, when he was admitted to the prestigious screenwriters' course at
the Moscow Institute of Literature. For the next two decades, Gorenstein made
his living writing for Russian films and television — his greatest achievement
being the film "Solaris" (1972), a philosophical parable disguised
as science fiction, directed by the noted Russian director Andrei Tarkovski.

But
Gorenstein was not satisfied with his work in the film industry; not only were
just five of his 16 scripts actually produced, but it was the word, not the
image, that he truly valued. He established his reputation as a writer with
his only Soviet publication, the early autobiographical novella "A Building
with a Little Tower" (1964), made possible because of the relatively liberal
ideological climate of the time. From the mid-1970s his fiction began to appear
regularly in various émigré Russian publications in Israel, Germany
and the United States. In 1980, following his participation in the samizdat
literary almanac Metropol, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union and thereafter
lived in West Berlin, supporting himself from books published in German and
French as well as from a German victims' pension.

Gorenstein
was "rediscovered" in post-communist Russia and even became a literary
celebrity after the publication of three volumes of his selected works in Moscow
in the early 1990s. However, his popularity proved short-lived, and until recently
some of his major works were available only in foreign editions, most of which
were issued by the small New York-based Russian press Slovo/Word. Not only his
contentious political views but also his iconoclastic literary tastes, which
he flaunted in articles and interviews, contributed to his alienation from the
mainstream of Russian cultural life.

Yet
despite his marginality — or perhaps because of it — Gorenstein
always felt himself part and parcel of the great Russian literary tradition.
His attitude to that tradition is different from that of his celebrated Russian-Jewish
literary precursors, Isaac Babel and Vasily Grossman. Whereas Babel tried to
have his Soviet cake and eat it, too, by inscribing himself into the new Soviet
ideological and stylistic idiom and preserving his autonomy as a Jewish artist
— a delicate position which sometimes led him to ambiguity if not compromise
— Gorenstein was always a staunch opponent of all forms of totalitarianism
and antisemitism.

Like
Babel, he was attuned to the nuances of Russian-Jewish idiom, but he was also
able to elevate this "Jewspeak" from the level of melodramatic ethnography
to the philosophical heights of classic Russian literary discourse. He was less
reverential toward the grand narrative of Russian literature than Grossman,
whose magisterial novel "Life and Fate" was a successful 20th-century
recreation of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." From his carefully articulated
position as a provincial Jew, Gorenstein relentlessly challenged Tolstoy and
Fyodor Dostoevsky, both of whom he denigrated as ideological writers. Yet like
his great predecessors, Gorenstein wrestled with the big questions of Russian
literature: the nature of evil, the destiny of Russia and its people, the alienation
of the "little man" from the society. His closest literary precursor
was Anton Chekhov, who also tended toward the parochial and ordinary.

It
may be that Gorenstein's significance as a writer and a thinker will become
evident gradually, as his self-imposed image of a literary provocateur and intellectual
anarchist fades and more of his works filter into readers' consciousness. He
left a large and diverse legacy: one unfinished and six finished novels, dozens
of novellas, short stories, plays and film scripts, as well as numerous articles,
essays and pamphlets. He wrote biographical and historical novels, dramas, science
fiction and metaphysical parables, but his greatest achievement remains the
realistic fiction based on his own life experience, such as the novella "Travel
Companions" (1989), his only book published so far in English.

On
a local train that slowly progresses through the peaceful Ukrainian countryside
in that book, the Jewish narrator, a successful Moscow writer and journalist,
listens to the life story told by his travel companion, a Ukrainian village
invalid who survived the horrors of collectivization, hunger, German occupation
and Soviet prison. In this modern replay of Sholom Aleichem's "Railroad
Stories" the motifs of displacement and chaos reach truly macabre dimensions
that are offset by the tranquil beauty of the cross-country landscape —
"abundant in natural grave spots, which facilitate the technology of mass
executions and burials," as the narrator dryly observes.

The
train's route runs through Berdichev, once a thriving Jewish commercial town
and the setting of many classical Yiddish novels beginning with the books of
Mendele Moykher-Sforim. In Gorenstein's fictional universe Berdichev also occupies
a special place as the symbol of Jewish homelessness, "a ghost-town, a
town which is dispersed over the country and the entire world, a town populated
by people who may have never set their foot on Berdichev streets: a Moscow professor,
a New Yorkyer, a Paris artist." "Berdichev" is also the title
of Gorenstein's most Jewish work, an unsentimental play about the life of Soviet
Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, which he defined as "a drama is three
acts, eight scenes and 92 scandals" (1975).

The
writer's most ambitious work is "The Psalm" (1981), subtitled "a
novel-meditation about four of God's punishments." This 450-page novel-parable
tells the story of the antichrist, disguised as an ordinary Jew visiting Russia
in the 20th century. The book caused an uproar among nationalist and Christian
intelligentsia in Russia, including Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who took it as a
Jewish attack on Christianity. Gorenstein's antichrist is the last biblical
prophet who is sent to test Christianity against its own moral foundations,
ultimately accusing Christianity of producing the demonic forces of communism
and fascism that hold Holy Russia and Christian Europe in thrall. The controversial
religious component of the novel may indeed be disturbing for a reader accustomed
to a culture of political correctness, but there is no gainsaying its outstanding
artistic power.

Suffering
from cancer during his last year, Gorenstein continued working on his play about
Hitler, in which he wanted to trace the character's development from a "nasty
petty demon" to the "evil genius of mankind." He spent his last
months in a small and gloomy Berlin apartment located near former S.S. headquarters,
surrounded by his family and his beloved cats, whom he named after the characters
from "Solaris."

Mikhail Krutikov
is the author of "Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914"
(Stanford University, 2001). He last appeared in these pages writing about the
memoirs of Alexander Bovin, Russia's former ambassador to Israel.